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Watering Hole: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 – Rant from CT

I have a friend who is a retired professional writer and she posts “rants” on Facebook. With her permission, I am posting her most recent rant.

I love the way some people make up definitions of words to suit their own purposes.

Yesterday in the Reading Eagle a woman carrying on about the current focus of Tea hatred, the children coming across the border, said the word refugee means someone fleeing from a state of war. So these kids aren’t “refugees.”

I got out the ol’ Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which defined “refugee” as someone fleeing from a country because of danger or persecution. No mention of war as a prerequisite.

The woman went on to lecture that kids in our own country need help. After all, the economy is bad and so on and so forth.

When I read that, I started thinking about kids in our own country, too. Just probably not the same kids she was thinking about.

I was thinking about kids I saw standing in the middle of a godforsaken snow-covered desert on a Navajo reservation many years ago. Torn clothes, little food, missionaries and government workers living in beautiful houses, grand pianos in their living rooms. Those kids need help too. They always have. Ever since we invaded their country and took everything they had, they’ve needed help. Ever since we took their uranium to power our addiction to electronics, they needed help. Ever since we won their land from them, fair and square, first by poisoning them with smallpox and booze and then by taking any arable land they had left by murdering those who tried to stop us, they needed help.

But those weren’t the kids this woman was talking about. And it occurred to me that’s why these haters are so afraid–because all hate stems from fear.

Oh, these good Christian folks might fear the wrath of God. But I’ll tell you what.

I couldn’t agree more; the posted rant precisely drives nails into America’s greed-inspired coffin. It reminded me, in fact, of a paragraph from a book by Raymond Friday Locke entitled The Book of the Navajo; (Mankind Publishing, Los Angeles; 6th ed., 2001):

“Their [Navajo, the Dineh] concept of … man’s relation to the world around him and his place in the order of things, is directly opposed to that of Anglo-American society. The Navajo’s concept of religion is so total that it can be said that there is no such thing as religion in Navajo culture because everything is religious. Everything a Navajo knows – his shelter, his fields, his livestock, the sky above him and the ground upon which he walks – is holy. The Navajos for the most part, have long resisted Christianity. They look upon it as a “part-time” religion where a man’s god is available to him for only a few hours on Sunday and then has to be sought out in a special house where his spirit dwells. From the beginning, the Navajos were repulsed by the European’s disrespect for and misuse of the land, for the land is the Earth Mother, she who gives life to humanity. A society that would destroy the source of life and worship an abstract god in a place set aside for that purpose has, historically, had little to offer the Navajo. For there is nothing more revered nor more loved by the Navajos than the land they call Dinetah.”

In that one paragraph the author sums up the bulk of the undercurrent of failure that has driven the United States for at least two centuries, the same undercurrent of failure that is currently picking up speed at frightening rate. The blindness to reality implicit in “the white man” is as stunning as it is ultimately fatal.

Good post. An anthropology professor I know agreed with me that the First People were so much more in tuned spiritually, yet ‘civilized’ people gave their beliefs such short shrift. We could learn a lot about ourselves by doing nothing, saying nothing, just observing.

“good” christian folks live in abject fear of being wrong about the whole thing. Christianity in this country is the status quo, clinging to it carries a belief they will be “saved”. Their possessions will be saved, their comfort, their perceived superiority, their privilege. Saved from the task of actually thinking objectively about cause and effect in the world around them, saved from the responsibility of having to do anything about it.

George Zimmerman now working night security. Technically, not “working” since he isn’t getting paid. And the guy he’s doing for didn’t authorize him to do it. Otherwise, he’s totally working night security.

“The marriage of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife Maureen had “broken down” and the first lady had developed a crush on the man who is the star witness at the couple’s high-profile corruption trial, her attorney said Tuesday.”
Her defense appears to be that Bob ignored her while under the pressure of being responsible for all the vaginas in Virginia.

We keep hoping the humidity will go away, back where it belongs…midWest, South, south east, east coast.
We are not used to our lungs nearly bursting a/o collapsing, clammy feeling, etc…
we detest elevated humidity!

We have 91 with low humidity and that is enough. My poor Scout doesn’t like it. I took her at lunch for a regular in the neighbourhood walk and three minutes in she stopped dead in her tracks and would not go any further!

Sorry, but as horrific as the holocaust was, this shouldn’t give the Israeli government the perpetual right to inflict horror on others. Someone needs to be the bigger man, the adult in the room and stop the slaughtering of innocent Palestinian and Israeli citizens.

Somethings off when the United States jumps all over Russia screaming Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!, stirs up the EU to do the same; and does nothing more than patty slap the Israeli’s with admonitions to behave themselves. I don’t know where the outrage is but I’ll bet the Wolfsteins of Wall Street will keep a lid on it.

The senate just passed a bill to put a band aid on the transportation fund. House republicans will most likely reject it and add their provision to pay for half of the fund, something called pension fucking smoothing. (H/T Jon Stewart)

This is where companies do not have to contribute to pension funds for a year, raising their tax rate where the extra taxes would go towards the transportation fund which of course would cost the government more down the road and weaken the already pension system.

My thought is this. There is talk by democrats of raising the gas tax which has been the same since 1993. Republicans will never go for this and it would piss off already cash strapped Americans. So I have an idea.

How about creating a new gas tax which would take a percentage away from the prophets of the oil companies without affecting the price at the pump for consumers? Yes I know this could never happen but at some point we are going to have a serious discussion in our society….how much is too much?

When we continue to allow the interests of multinational corporations and their shareholders to be more important than the interests of our citizens, our communities, our planet we will just continue this death spiral we are experiencing, not only in America but world wide also.